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It didn’t take long for the flattery to begin. On Thursday, the Board of Peace, an entity set up by President Donald Trump, held its first formal meeting, in Washington, D.C., at the newly rebranded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At the event, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the President of Kazakhstan, proposed that the board administer “a special President Trump award,” to recognize its namesake’s “outstanding peace-building efforts and achievements.”

If the moment felt too on the nose, too fawning and obsequious, no one seemed to bat an eye; Tokayev was just one of numerous foreign dignitaries and U.S. officials to heap praise upon Trump at the event. Also in the room was Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and facilitator of the World Cup, who, in December, had awarded Trump with the newly manufactured FIFA Peace Prize, during a ceremony at the nearby Kennedy Center, which Trump, for good measure, has also rebranded with his name.

The Board of Peace’s meeting focussed on collective efforts to stabilize and rebuild war-blighted Gaza, but Trump’s need to be at the heart of it all cast a shadow over the proceedings. He kicked off the meeting with a customarily rambling speech, rattling off his myriad peace initiatives and imagined diplomatic triumphs, even while floating the prospect of imminent war with Iran. The Administration has amassed military assets in the region at a scale that suggests the possibility of a sustained offensive campaign. “You’re going to be finding out over the next probably ten days,” Trump said, as several heads of state and top diplomats from countries in Iran’s neighborhood sat in grim silence.

A lot remains confusing and uncertain about the Board of Peace. Thursday’s event produced apparent pledges of about seven billion dollars from nine countries for the reconstruction of Gaza while Trump has separately suggested that the U.S. would muster ten billion dollars on its own for the board, though it was unclear where that money was coming from and whether it would pass congressional scrutiny. There were also offers of thousands of military personnel from countries including Indonesia and Morocco to compose an “international stabilization force” to police the territory. And yet details are sketchy on where such a force would be deployed and how all the money earmarked for it will be tracked and disbursed. A video presentation shown at the meeting touted A.I.-generated images of skyscrapers and luxury beach resorts in Gaza and proffered airy visions of the enclave turning into an “Abrahamic gateway,” a hub for trade networks that would span Europe and India and thread together the Middle East. Less was said about the bleak facts on the ground in Gaza, where Hamas refuses to fully disarm, humanitarian organizations are being denied access by Israel, and civilians languish in limbo, as well as unresolved political questions surrounding the conflict, including the fading prospects of a viable, independent Palestinian state. Among the officials at the Board of Peace meeting, mentions of the need for a two-state solution were scarce.

In November, the United Nations Security Council endorsed a U.S.-backed resolution that authorized the creation of the international force and gave its blessing to the Board of Peace’s stated mandate to aid in Gaza’s redevelopment. But, when the board’s charter emerged, it did not include a word about Gaza. Instead, analysts and diplomats see a far more ambitious project in motion: that Trump is seeking to create an entity that only he controls and which can supplant the work of the Security Council—or, as the board’s charter itself puts it, “depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed.”

This is the “world order Trump prefers,” Phil Gordon, a former White House coördinator for the Middle East in the Obama Administration and former national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, told me. “It’s not a genuinely multilateral one where others have a say, or the United States is constrained,” he said, but one where “the United States, and Trump personally, is at the center of everything.”

On Thursday, Trump outlined his more expansive desires, suggesting that the board could “take it a step further” to deal with other “hot spots” around the world. The faltering U.N., he said, would be brought “back to health.” It was a curious statement, given Trump’s hostility toward the U.N.—in the space of a year, his Administration has pulled the U.S. out of dozens of U.N. or U.N.-linked agencies, and the U.S. still owes the cash-strapped U.N. close to four billion dollars in outstanding dues. That shortfall is one of the reasons for a punishing wave of austerity currently ripping through the U.N. system.

Yet the U.N. provides an obvious reference for the Board of Peace. The board’s chintzy logo is a barely disguised facsimile of the U.N.’s emblem—the sombre olive wreath of peace has been turned into gilded clip art, and the U.N.’s insignia depicting a world map has been shrunk to what looks like MAGA’s imagined sphere of influence, showing North America, the northern rump of Latin America, and, yes, Greenland. Apart from the United States, only one other founding board member, El Salvador, is included in the territory covered in the logo. Gaza—for whose governance and reconstruction the board was established—is nowhere in view.

The Board of Peace was soft-launched, in January, in Davos, Switzerland, when the organizers of the World Economic Forum yielded their platform to the White House for a gaudy opening ceremony. Trump sat center stage as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took turns lavishing the President with praise for his contributions to global peace, as attendees did again on Thursday. Then a couple dozen world leaders and ministerial-level dignitaries joined Trump, standing around him as he signed the board’s founding charter, which enshrines Trump as an individual—not just as the President of the United States—as the board’s chairman in perpetuity.

The current membership of the board is a motley mix. It includes prominent countries already invested in bringing stability to Gaza—Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies. The White House has also roped in governments involved in other alleged Trump-led peace initiatives, such as those of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Kosovo. Governments of participating countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia may see membership as a low-stakes way to boost their geopolitical clout. And then there are Trump’s fellow-travellers who have no obvious skin in the game beyond a desire to gratify the President, such as Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, a libertarian firebrand, and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent illiberal nationalist.

Trump dispatched invitations to dozens of countries to join the Board of Peace, but he has been mostly rebuffed or kept at arm’s length by the U.S.’s traditional allies. European skepticism only deepened after Trump sought to include Russia and Belarus in the project. (Russia has yet to announce its decision, whereas Belarus agreed, though Belarusian officials said they did not receive visas from the U.S. to attend the meeting on Thursday.) In January, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued a joint call for the defense and strengthening of the U.N. in the face of Trump’s enterprise. Pope Leo XIV made a similar pitch for the U.N. in declining Trump’s invitation.

Sitting in the room during the meeting on Thursday, a European official in attendance was bemused by the succession of leaders voicing their admiration for Trump, especially after a number of top European politicians have been mocked for their own attempts to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. President over the past year. “One cannot only blame Europeans flattering you-know-who,” the official told me. “We’re not even the worst ones.”

Board-membership terms last three years (conveniently running out just as Trump’s term does). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but it’s unclear to most diplomats whether this experiment will exist or matter beyond Trump’s time in office. Two Presidents I spoke to in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectation of financial contributions or commitments. The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, instead cast her small nation’s participation as an act of historical redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia. “It was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,” she told me. “Now, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and we are helping carry that peace forward.”

The Armenian President, Vahagn Khachaturyan, told me that he hoped that the board could help “enhance confidence” in the U.N. system by boosting peacemaking efforts. He lamented that “principles of coexistence are very often violated, and the United Nations is not often able to prevent those violations,” gesturing to the perennial problem of the Security Council, where one of the five veto-wielding powers—in recent history, chiefly Russia and the U.S.—can block significant resolutions to address conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza.

But Trump and his lieutenants rarely speak of principles and seem far more interested in establishing an arena where only the U.S.’s veto counts. You could hear their ideological animus this past weekend, at a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy, scoffed at the “hosannas and shibboleths” that constitute talk of shared values and paeans to the rules-based order. Rubio poured scorn on the U.N., saying that “on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

Thant Myint-U, a Burmese-British historian whose grandfather U Thant was the U.N.’s third Secretary-General, said that, “despite all of its failings,” the U.N. “has been a big part of eighty years of unparalleled peace and prosperity in human history.” He warned that if the Board of Peace picks up momentum, it may “set the stage for a much broader collapse of the whole U.N. architecture that we’ve had since 1945.”

There’s plenty of reason to believe that the board may not be much more than a Trump vanity project of dissonant parts and vague goals that will fade from view amid the rolling dramas of his Presidency. But, as the U.S. plays spoiler within an international system in which it was once the linchpin, no other world power seems especially eager to pick up the slack. Thant Myint-U said, “At a time when Washington is challenging the very fundamentals of the U.N., both through the Board of Peace but also through aid cuts and funding cuts and everything else, no other country is saying, We’re either going to make up financially for the missing U.S. contributions, or we’re going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the U.N.”

By the sheer fact that the White House is staking so much on the Board of Peace’s success—Trump told his counterparts on Thursday that it could be “the most important day of our careers”—the board may actually have legs. Phil Gordon, the former national-security adviser to Harris, said, “As absurd as it is, it’s also the only game in town.”

This doesn’t bode well for the U.N., or for Gaza, where the Board of Peace’s role remains vague. Figures including the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hold key positions of authority on the board, but no Palestinian official sits on the top executive rungs of its organizational structure, a fact that led Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, to dismiss the whole enterprise as “a colonialist operation.” A U.S.- and Israeli-vetted Palestinian technocratic committee has been set up, but its head, Ali Shaath, was visibly sidelined during Thursday’s meeting and appears to have been working thus far from Cairo. Meanwhile, Gaza is carved up into one zone under Israeli military control and one where Hamas still holds sway; the bulk of Gaza’s population lives in the latter and is often hit by periodic Israeli strikes on alleged Hamas targets. Hundreds of Palestinians have died since the formal ceasefire was clinched, in October.

On Thursday, U.S. and Israeli officials insisted that Hamas’s full disarmament was a prerequisite to any further progress. But the militant group is unwilling to engage in a complete surrender and abandonment of its self-styled “resistance” mission while Israeli forces remain in Gaza and while rival armed factions, some backed by Israel, gain ground in a territory flush with small arms. Michael Hanna, a Middle East expert and the U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group, said, “There just hasn’t been the kind of pragmatic diplomacy to try to see if there’s a way forward on this issue.”

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued that the Israelis, for their part, likely expect the Board of Peace to fail, not least because “they are very skeptical that anyone will disarm Hamas, other than them”—something that would “require a very significant and quite destructive military operation.” That potential explosion of violence may also play on the minds of wealthy Arab donors whom Trump has lined up to bankroll the Board of Peace’s efforts, but who may end up reneging. “Unless Hamas is disarmed, there is every reason to think there will be another round of this conflict, and most of the donors are not going to actually pay to reconstruct Gaza just to have it be destroyed again,” Shapiro said.

Israel can live with the status quo, but Palestinians in Gaza cannot. Hanna told me that if things stay “in this unreconstructed state, then it’s a slow-bleed displacement that happens.” He warned, “In the face of a kind of stark reality where Gazan society has been razed to the ground, people eventually will vote with their feet.” ♦

In Aidan Zamiri’s recent mockumentary, “The Moment,” Charli XCX plays a version of herself: a pop star who’s contemplating her next move after achieving great success with a Zeitgeist-defining album called “BRAT.” What should she do, Charli wonders, now that the clock on her relevance is ticking? Even though “people are getting sick of [her],” should she “go even harder,” as Kylie Jenner advises her, and continue to celebrate “brat summer forever”? Or should she stop harping on the same string and, instead, recede, regroup, and attempt to remake herself into an avatar for a new era?

Though I felt like Zamiri’s movie didn’t ultimately offer a satisfying answer to the quandary it presents, I found the quandary itself fascinating. How long can a cultural product go on captivating its audience? And what is to be done once it stops? As I watched “The Moment,” I kept thinking how apropos this question was to the Bravo reality series “Vanderpump Rules,” which, on its début, in 2013, began filming the lives of a group of good-looking servers and bartenders at the West Hollywood restaurant SUR, co-owned by a sassy, handsome Brit named Lisa Vanderpump. These protagonists were classic show-business aspirants who, having come to Los Angeles to be within grasping distance of their dreams, fell, in the interim, into service work. The show’s fundamental genius was turning its spotlight on this unglamorous if drama-filled purgatory, and, within a couple of seasons, its subjects, who had been fighting and fucking each other in obscurity for years, had been made into bona-fide stars, known nationwide for their messy love lives and interpersonal skirmishes. They might not have become celebrated models, actors, or singers, as they had initially planned, but with “Vanderpump Rules” their moment had nonetheless arrived, and Bravo was naturally keen to extend it for as long as possible.

Over time, though, this newfound celebrity began to chafe against the show’s establishing constraints. No one really believed that these now quite famous, no-longer-so-young protagonists—sexy dissembler Jax Taylor, excitable d.j. James Kennedy, grumpy drunk-texter Katie Maloney, volatile vixen Kristen Doute, evasive dandy Tom Sandoval, and the rest of the gang—would continue to clock in for shifts at SUR and receive stern if maternal talking-tos from Lisa Vanderpump forever. To deal with this contradiction, more grownup plotlines were developed, with the show following cast members as they pursued other hospitality endeavors, among them the West Hollywood lounge TomTom and, later, the sandwich shop Something About Her. In Season 8, a new cadre of rookie bartenders and servers were thrown into the mix, but their addition felt contrived; meanwhile, the series’ seasoned old standbys had begun to lose their ability to amuse and astonish. “Vanderpump” was running on fumes.

Then, in 2023, during Season 10, what I can only describe as an act of God took place: It was revealed that Tom Sandoval had secretly cheated on his longtime girlfriend and fellow cast member, Ariana Madix, with a newer, younger cast member, Raquel (née Rachel) Leviss, right under the camera’s nose. The true, organic surprise of this turn of events—to Bravo, to the viewers, to most of the show’s cast—created a frenzy, and “Vanderpump” experienced a resurrection. At the time, I tweeted, “vanderpump this season gives me hope. you might think something is dead… you might think something is over… and then it rises again like a goddam PHOENIX. A lesson to us all.” In actuality, however, I knew that this kind of rebirth was both rare and most likely brief, and that, soon enough, the show’s moment would once again be over.

This was borne out when, after “Scandoval” fever died down, “Vanderpump Rules” pretty much died with it. Season 11 dealt with the affair’s fallout, but between the lack of authentic, gripping new story lines, Madix’s refusal to film with the adulterous Sandoval, and a number of the “Vanderpump” O.G.s’ decampment to “The Valley”—a sequel of sorts about their depressing if still messy married-with-children lives—the writing was on the wall. When news officially broke, in late 2024, that “Vanderpump Rules” would be rebooted with an entirely new cast for Season 12, the Bravo honcho Andy Cohen, who isn’t a producer on the series, called it “absolutely the right thing to do,” noting how impressed he was that the show had gone as long as it had when, for years, “slowly but surely, none of [the cast members] were working at SUR.” Now it seemed like it was finally time to go back to where it all began.

Heraclitus once suggested, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”—a sentiment echoed by Lisa Vanderpump when, on the first episode of Season 12, she laughingly tells a cameraperson, “my tits, they get lower and lower every year, so we need to make the frame wider.” Time’s flux affects not only the body but also the world outside of it, which in Vanderpump’s case means the West Hollywood restaurant scene SUR is part of. As the camera captures the deserted intersection of Robertson and Santa Monica Boulevards, she notes that, since the pandemic, West Hollywood has never recovered its onetime vibrancy as a night-life hub, and that her own establishments have suffered as a result. In 2023, she was forced to shutter the gay lounge PUMP, just around the corner from SUR, which she admits also “hasn’t been thriving.” Vanderpump, however, isn’t one to give up. When SUR’s co-owner, Nathalie Pouille Zapata, tearfully reminds her that the restaurant has been “struggling so much,” Vanderpump reassures her, “We have survived over the years, we’re going to survive now.” Later, in a lecture she delivers to her staff, she admonishes them to shape up: “Many restaurants . . . have closed down. . . . This is survival of the fittest!”

From its very beginning, as a show whose cast had come to town with dreams of making it in the entertainment industry, “Vanderpump Rules” has had a hint of the Darwinian about it. (As Alfred Hayes, in his 1958 novel “My Face for the World to See,” writes about achievement in Hollywood: “Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure.”) And yet, when the show premièred in 2013, we were still in the Obama years. Hope was in the air, SUR was bustling, and, if the staff started out poor, they were still bright and bushy-tailed, certain that the only way was up. As Kristen Doute, a longtime server, said on the series’ first season, Vanderpump “doesn’t want us to be lifelong waitresses or bartenders but to kind of use it as a stepping stone to get into whatever it is that we aspire to be.”

To be sure, the staff on Season 12 of “Vanderpump” are still searching for stardom. Audrey, a twenty-two-year-old blond Texan who serves as a hostess, has been waiting tables since she was sixteen to support her “dreams of becoming an actress”; Natalie, a self-proclaimed “crazy bitch” and bartender, is an aspiring singer and actress who “grew up going to the same mall” as Ariana Grande, and “trained with the lady that discovered Orlando Bloom”; Chris, a ripped New Jersey bartender who lives with his cousin, the equally ripped host Jason, wants to be a “big actor” and “model for John Varvatos.” But the grandness of these dreams butts up against the precarity that their dreamers are facing. If, in the show’s first iteration, the staff lived mostly close to West Hollywood, where SUR is located, they are now more far flung, suggesting Los Angeles’s increasingly inhospitable real-estate climate. Chris and Jason live in Marina del Rey; Venus, a flamboyant server, lives in Winnetka, in the Valley; Shayne, a buff, lady-killing friend of the gang with a shock of “nineties hair,” lives in Burbank. There is much talk of rent and the lengths people are willing to go in order to pay it. Survival is the currency of the hour.

Much of the season is given over, as in the show’s first iteration, to the round-robin-style hookups and breakups taking place among the young and largely attractive staff. Marcus, a worried-looking server who recently lost both his parents, is off and on with Kim, a fellow-server; Angelica, a hostess who still lives with her ex, goes out with Jason and, when that entanglement sours, moves on for a bit with Shayne; Natalie, too, goes on a date with Shayne, but then makes out with Jason on a staff trip to wine country; Audrey and Chris begin seeing each other, but Audrey has doubts about the sincerity of his intentions; and so on. What serves as the dramatic centerpiece of the season, however, is the gang’s discovery that Chris and Jason not only work at SUR but also have successful OnlyFans accounts, and that they made a joint video that could be deemed “incestuous,” a claim that Angelica makes, and which the cousins both deny. (“Massaging each other is not incestuous. . . . We were not spreading each other’s assholes,” Jason tells the camera.) When Angelica also finds out that Jason uses a penis pump—presumably for his OnlyFans posts—she makes a meal of it, telling everyone so as to embarrass him. (“It’s for a man who can’t get an erection,” she helpfully explains to a surprised Lisa Vanderpump.)

Angelica’s attempt at humiliation fails, however, because Jason and Chris refuse to be shamed. Before moving to L.A, they both worked as strippers. (“I needed to pay rent,” Jason says, “and I thought, What’s the fastest way to make money?”) The OnlyFans gambit, too, is a financial proposition. When he moved to L.A., Jason worked three jobs and ate cat food to survive. Chris lived in his Jetta. “Serving, you could make good money, but we were still kind of, like, in the hole,” he says. (SUR, certainly, won’t suffice. When Kim tells Demy, a manager, that she ordered four hundred dollars’ worth of stuff on Amazon, Demy scoffs, “That’s good, cause you make so much money at SUR.” To which Kim replies, “I did the Afterpay thing, where you can pay later.”) After Jason started an OnlyFans, Chris was impressed with his cousin’s new earning power and joined in. “We own our OnlyFans shit. We do what we do,” Jason says. As for the penis pump, both employ it, and neither minds talking about it. “I use a penis pump because I’m on OnlyFans to overdeliver,” Chris says. (Listening to his words, I was reminded for a moment of Taylor Swift, who in her docuseries about her recent, extravagant Eras Tour says, “I wanted to overserve the fans.”)

Shayne, too, is unabashed about his own perceived limitations. An aspiring actor and screenwriter, he was introduced to drugs and drink as a child by his family, and is now sober. But his traumatic earlier years have clearly scarred him both mentally and physically. As a young man, he was shot multiple times in a fight, and was paralyzed for a spell, an event that has affected his ability to achieve an erection. “Me personally, I could never be embarrassed about a penis pump, because I got shot, and so I have erectile dysfunction, and I have to take Viagra,” he tells the camera, matter-of-factly. “For me, that’s just life.” As far as Chris and Jason’s exploits on OnlyFans go, “Once I found out how much money these guys were making,” Shayne says, he felt they should “do whatever the hell [they] wanna do.” He, meanwhile, is making a quick and easy buck by starring in vertical micro-dramas, in which low-budget, feature-length productions are cut into “very, very soapy,” phone-friendly two-minute clips. “I’ve made a lot of money this year,” he says, explaining that an actor can make ten to fifteen thousand dollars a pop.

This it-is-what-it-is, reduced-expectations vibe is a little depressing and a little mercenary, but there’s also something open and authentic about it. Everyone at SUR knows that life now is a struggle for survival, and no one is pretending they’re something they’re not. This honesty, perhaps counterintuitively, allows for a new sense of vulnerability. There is much talk among the “Vanderpump” protagonists of opening one’s heart—of approaching life and love sincerely. “My heart is fucking aching,” Venus, the server, says, after fighting with Kim; “I like wearing my heart on my sleeve and showing her truly who I am,” Jason says, when trying to woo Angelica; “I’m a little nervous. Like every time I talk about it, my heart, like, palpitates a little bit,” Audrey says, of her relationship with Chris, whom she wants to see a “deeper side” of. We are no longer in a moment of pure surfaces. When Angelica decides to get a breast enlargement, Jason sounds a warning. “A boob job can’t enhance the personality,” he tells the camera. “That takes fucking therapy.” ♦

It’s a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That’s how Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” and Alfred Uhry’s “Last Night of Ballyhoo” begin, and also Ian Buruma’s memoir about his grandparents, “Their Promised Land.” The idea is, as soon as you show that, you’ve got the audience’s full attention, especially if it’s a Jewish audience, because it’s so peculiar.

When I was growing up, the idea that it was peculiar wouldn’t have occurred to me—­all the Jews in New Orleans, at least the ones we knew, celebrated Christmas, though our family did so a little more enthusiastically than the others. Weeks in advance, we would choose our tree, haul carefully preserved boxes of beautiful and fragile ornaments out of the attic, summon an attitude of mixed reverence and joy for trimming the tree, and place wreaths and other decorations around the house.

On Christmas Eve, we would sing the standard carols and my father would solemnly read out loud Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” On Christmas morning my sister and I would arise at dawn and sit impatiently in front of the tree, waiting to open dozens of presents that had come in from across the Lemann family’s expanse of relatives, friends, and law-firm clients. Once or twice, Father went to a good deal of effort to arrange to have a grandly presented roast suckling pig, with a small apple stuffed in its mouth for decoration, which is about the most unkosher dish imaginable, as the main course at our Christmas dinner.

As I got older, I began to have a sense that there was a different American Jewish life out there somewhere. Father’s taste in reading in those years ran to Trollope, Thackeray, and Walter Scott, but my mother had novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud on her bedstand, and I would sometimes look at these when nobody was around. Or, though it was rare in those days, there would be a television show or a movie with a character you were meant to read as Jewish, who looked and spoke like nobody we knew in New Orleans.

I can’t remember Israel ever being mentioned in our house, including during the 1967 war that commanded the full attention of most American Jews. Is it possible that the Holocaust was never mentioned, either? It seems hard to believe, but that’s the way I remember it. When something utterly, horrifyingly upends your view of the world and your place in it, you have the choice of simply shutting out the destabilizing new information. Once, when I was attending Sunday school at our Reform temple, a teacher showed us “Night and Fog,” Alain Resnais’s short documentary film about Nazi concentration camps, which was released in 1956 and contained a few of the now familiar images of stacked-­up corpses and skeletal survivors. She was shocked that, as far as she could tell, none of us in the class had been told there had been concentration camps, and not so many years earlier.

I can see that one might read this and ask, Why not just convert? Part of the answer is that in New Orleans, at least our New Orleans, everybody knew everybody else, going back for at least two generations. There wouldn’t have been any point to our pretending not to be Jewish, because everybody thought of us as Jewish and that would never change.

Beyond that, we were conspicuously different from most people we knew in New Orleans in ways that comported with what Jews were thought to be like. We had rooms full of books in our house, we had more money, we had modern art instead of hunting prints on the walls, we didn’t drink much by New Orleans standards. What Father wanted was for being Jewish to mean what he remembered it as meaning when he was growing up, in the days when the Reform movement’s universalism, embodied in its founding document, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, was in full flower—before the Holocaust, before Eastern European Jews had become dominant in American Jewish culture. He wanted it to be elegant, comfortable in the wider world (especially the upper-­class world), not too conspicuous. Long after I’d left home, he’d question me, in his characteristic tone of mock outrage, about a wide variety of Jewish customs and practices that over the years became part of my adult life. Why did Jews wear “headgear”? Why did they wear prayer shawls? Why did they eat smoked salmon, when everybody knows that’s Scottish, not Jewish? All these, at heart, were variants of the same question: Why couldn’t things still be the way they were at Temple Sinai, a grand edifice on St. Charles Avenue, in the nineteen-thirties?

The fierceness with which he clung to these preferences was a standard, long-running German Jewish response to a new wave of Jewish exclusion, which began in the United States in the late nineteenth century and lasted for many decades. Back in 1879, a relative of mine named Lazard Kahn, an immigrant from Alsace who was a rising businessman, wrote a letter to Thomas Nast, the famous cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly. “My esteemed sir,” he began, in a strong, assertively calligraphed hand, and went on to suggest that Nast turn his satirical and moralizing attention to some recent highly publicized incidents in which Jews had been denied admission to fashionable hotels in New York. The best known of them had one of the leading German ­Jewish bankers, Joseph Seligman, turning up in 1877 at the elegant Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, and being told that henceforth no Jews could stay there. Other hotels soon followed suit. So did high-­society subdivisions, resorts, apartment buildings, and clubs—­and, even more consequentially, prestigious employers like banks, industrial corporations, law firms, universities, museums, and publishing houses. Thomas Nast did not produce a cartoon; indeed, a few years earlier, during the 1873 financial panic, Harper’s Weekly had published a cartoon that showed Jewish-looking bankers profiting from the crisis.

In New York, the leading German Jews did not react to the Grand Union Hotel incident by appealing to the humanitarian impulses of Gentiles, in the manner of Lazard Kahn’s letter to Nast. Instead, many of them came to see their new and unexpected troubles as the result of the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews which was just getting under way. Before 1880, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Jews in the United States, most of them German. By 1920, as many as three million Jews had arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t just far more numerous than the German Jews, they were more observant, more concentrated in urban slums, and much poorer. The way to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, many German Jews thought, would be to do something about them.

In 1891, three prominent German Jews—­a Schiff, a Seligman, and a Straus—­asked President Benjamin Harrison to pressure the tsar to adopt more lenient policies toward the Jews, and to stanch the rising incidence of pogroms, so that Russian Jews wouldn’t feel they had to immigrate to the United States. Another German ­Jewish project was the Galveston Plan (1907-14), which aimed to steer Jewish immigrants away from New York and other big cities, where there were highly visible Jewish slums. A third initiative was establishing a Yiddish-­language newspaper called Die Yiddische Welt, or the Jewish World, as an alternative to the unmannerly homegrown press, much of which was scandalous and socialist, at least to the German Jews’ way of thinking. Still another was funding the early Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine for Eastern European Jewish refugees, which would provide a destination that wasn’t New York.

Surely there was compassion in these efforts—­maybe even the enhanced compassion you would feel for people who were like you in some way. But it didn’t extend to actual mingling. As a son of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg said about his father, who contributed or raised millions to the aid of Jews in distress, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.”

In France in the late nineteenth century, a Jewish Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was put on trial on false charges of treason. Dreyfus’s sensational case turned him into a public enemy, and made it clear that France, the site of one of the earliest programs of Jewish emancipation, was not friendly to Jews, either. Theodor Herzl, the journalist who founded the modern Zionist movement, said he was converted by the Dreyfus case from a typically assimilated, secular Western European Jew into someone who believed that the time had come to declare the Diaspora a failure and create a Jewish nation. This did not appeal, to say the least, to German Jews in America. No idea was more threatening to our sub-tribe at the turn of the twentieth century than Zionism. We wanted to blend in, to be unobtrusive, to be accepted. Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal. Zionism called attention to the unsettling reality that millions of Jews in Europe wanted to leave—­many, no doubt, for America rather than for Palestine. Reform Judaism’s slogan was that we were a religion, not a race. Zionism was a secular movement rooted in Jewish identity: race, not religion.

Just as America’s carriage-trade institutions were systematically excluding Jews, the German Jews’ Reform institutions excluded or expelled Zionists. Kaufmann Kohler, a German-born Reform rabbi, became the president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1903. He purged Zionists from its faculty; he also barred a prominent Zionist from speaking at H.U.C. In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the national Reform leadership organization, issued a statement criticizing the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s official statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “The ideal of the Jew is not the establishment of a Jewish state—not the re-assertion of Jewish nationality which has long been outgrown,” the statement said. A few years after that, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and barred immigrants from Asia). This meant that Jews would have a hard time coming to the U.S.; Jewish migration to Palestine swelled.

In 1936, Julian Feibelman arrived as the new rabbi at New Orleans’s Temple Sinai. He wound up holding the job for thirty-­one years, and so being the main direct religious authority of both Father’s childhood and mine. In 1938, he married one of the Lemanns, which also made him, to me, Cousin Julian. Julian had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, when it was a town of around seven thousand people, without paved streets. His father, who, like most of the other Jews in town, owned a store, had the family eat matzos during Passover and take the day off on Yom Kippur, but that was the extent of their observance. They also celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays.

Julian had minimal childhood religious education: he didn’t know any Hebrew until, after attending a Methodist college in Jackson, he entered Reform rabbinical school at H.U.C. He wound up spending the first ten years of his career as the No. 2 rabbi at a large, prosperous Reform temple in Philadelphia, where the services were on Sunday, where there was likely a choir and an organ rather than a cantor, and where the custom was that gentlemen should remove their hats when they were indoors, not put them on.

While he was in Philadelphia, Julian enrolled in graduate school in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He researched and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation after he had moved to Temple Sinai: “A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community,” published in 1941. New Orleans, Julian reported, had fewer than two thousand Jewish families—relatively educated, secure, established, Reform. It had been spared the mass migration of Eastern European Jews, “which caused such congestion in New York City, overran the lower East-Side, and subsequently produced the social problems of the vicious sweat-­shops and tenements.” These Yiddish-speaking immigrants “brought with them the habits that long years of restriction and fear had inculcated.” More recently, Julian averred, New Orleans had spared itself another set of problems, because it was the destination of very few refugees from Nazi Germany.

There’s a capitalized headline breaking up the text of the dissertation: “Jews Are Not a Race.” Reading this today generates a full-­on emotional re-creation of the Jewish world I grew up in. Most Temple Sinai Jews were casual, wry, off-handed, unexcitable, and never overwrought, except when it came to anything obviously Jewish, in which case a high wall of absolute unacceptability went up. Standard-­issue Jewishness went against the way we had chosen to position ourselves. It raised the possibility that we might lose what we had.

The picture of the world and our place in it that we had constructed made it almost insuperably difficult to absorb, let alone confront, the destruction of the German Jews in Germany. It was like a violation of natural law: it required believing that what seemed impossible in Germany was possible; that an all-encompassing Jewish solidarity had become necessary; that Zionism might represent the only realistic future for many, even most, Jews.

Julian had family in Germany, including his much ­loved step-grandmother, and he had constant personal reminders of how desperate the situation there was. He’d get pleading letters from German Jews who were also named Feibelman, saying they were his relatives. Could he rescue them? (From 1938: “Dear Cousin: We are very disappointed and troubled of not yet having an answer to my letter that I have directed to you Oktober of the past year.” From 1941: “Please, Julian, try and try again, there is no time to lose anymore.”) “There was little I could do to help or bring comfort to them,” Julian wrote in a self-published memoir decades later; he surmised that many of the writers had probably just picked his name out of a phone book. If the larger implication of the individual cases was Zionism, he found that impossible, too. He firmly did not believe that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would help the Jews. “I never wanted to see a nation,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t have any faith in nationalism whatsoever, whether it’s Jewish, German, Russian, Chinese, or what.”

Word was beginning to leak out about the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews en masse. In the summer of 1942, a secretly anti-Nazi German businessman learned about the death camps; Heinrich Himmler had stopped by his mining company’s nearby villa, just after making an inspection tour of Auschwitz. The businessman told a Jewish banker in Switzerland what he’d heard. The news passed among the leadership of Jewish organizations. Gerhart Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, put it into the form of a telegram addressed to Stephen Wise, the head of that group, which reached Wise at the end of August. “Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3 ½ to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe, ” the telegram read.

A formidable, proud man, zealously liberal and ardently Zionist, Wise had carefully maintained direct relationships with Franklin Roosevelt and members of his Administration. His relationship with Roosevelt was mainly confined to Jewish matters, which led to a particular version of the court Jew’s eternal dilemma: Do you press hard and risk losing access or be cautious and keep the doors open?

Wise, choosing to play the insider, gave the telegram to a high-ranking State Department official, who asked him to keep Riegner’s report confidential until he could investigate it independently. Finally, after three months, the State Department told Wise that it was true: the Nazis had a plan to murder three million or four million Jews through industrial processes that surpassed in pure purposeless cruelty anything the world had ever seen. There would be no government announcement of this, but Wise could speak of it himself. He held a press conference, which got only moderate public attention. One can retrospectively chastise Wise for not being more aggressive—­but, for contrast, there is Julian Feibelman’s reaction. About a week after Wise’s press conference, Julian devoted a column in the New Orleans Jewish Ledger to criticizing Wise, and not because he thought Wise hadn’t acted quickly enough. To Julian, Wise’s account was not plausible. Why would Germany, in the middle of a vast offensive against the Soviet Union, divert precious men and matériel to killing “poor and actually harmless Jews,” when that would not help them win the war? Also, Wise had said that one of the Nazis’ methods for killing Jews was to inject air bubbles into their veins, at the rate of up to a hundred people per hour, but a doctor in New Orleans told Julian that this was impossible. Who knew what other wild exaggerations Wise had chosen to believe?

It bothered Julian, too, that Wise had announced what he had heard directly, when it might have been more appropriate for the announcement to come from the State Department. Of course, the State Department hadn’t and wouldn’t make such an announcement, but anti-Zionist Reform Jews like Julian typically felt that Jews should not advocate on their own behalf, that the advocacy should come from others, who were more neutral. That way it wouldn’t enhance the perception that Jews are pushy, loud, and aggressive. Julian ended his editorial by asking, “Would it not have been far better for Dr. Wise to have refrained from adding his name to these accounts?”

Wrath quickly came down on Julian’s head—­first from a Zionist Reform rabbi in New York named Louis Newman, then from Wise himself. Both of these rabbis were already furious about the formation of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization that a group of German Jews, including Julian, had founded in 1942. Why, Newman wrote, would Julian choose to give the world reason to doubt that the horrors unfolding in Europe were actually happening? Why would he lend his voice in opposition to the efforts to find a place of refuge for whatever Jews were able to survive? Wise’s letter to Julian was even harsher: “I am sorry for you. I pity you. I consider your attitude disgraceful in every sense. Instead of lifting a finger to help your people, you traduce one who has sought to do everything within his strength in order to touch the conscience of the American people and to avert further Hitler crimes against his people.”

In the summer of 1943, less than a year after Wise’s press conference, a member of the Polish resistance named Jan Karski came to Washington to give the still evidently unbelieving American officialdom another report on the Holocaust, then in its peak period of factory killing. Karski had managed to visit the Warsaw ghetto and a transit stop for the Bełżec extermination camp. He then secured meetings with, among others, President Roosevelt and the Vienna-born Felix Frankfurter, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939. Nearly four decades later, during the filming of Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah,” Karski reënacted his meeting with Frankfurter. Karski rose from his seat to demonstrate how, after he had laid out his terrible story, Frankfurter declared, almost shouting, “I don’t believe you!” It’s a resonant moment in the film—­but what did Frankfurter mean? Karski’s idea was that Frankfurter wasn’t reacting in the manner of Julian Feibelman, by questioning the facts. Instead, Frankfurter was saying that what he had heard went beyond the bounds of what he’d been able to consider possible, in a long life of crusading against injustices.

How could one live after learning this? Could it be put out of mind? After the war, Julian joined a delegation of American dignitaries on a trip to Europe that included a stop in Berlin. The city still lay in ruin, filled with piles of rubble and half-­destroyed buildings. These conditions shocked and horrified him; he thought the United States should not have demanded an unconditional surrender from the Nazis, so that the war might have ended earlier and with less destruction. Just before he left, he stopped by the office of the Joint Distribution Committee, an organization devoted to helping Jewish refugees, to ask whether there was any news about his step-grandmother and his cousins, from whom he had heard nothing in years. As he told the story, the people in the office promised to try to find them. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Julian to pursue his search for his missing relatives more doggedly, but he hadn’t chosen to do that during the war, either. He never heard back from the Joint Distribution Committee. He returned to New Orleans and resumed his old life at Temple Sinai. With the establishment of the state of Israel, in 1948, he resigned from the American Council for Judaism, though without endorsing Zionism.

I grew up in the penumbra of the American Council for Judaism. Father was not a member, but he shared its perspective, and I didn’t encounter Zionism when I was growing up. It was only when I left New Orleans that I realized how profoundly different, in fact opposite, the Council’s views were to what most American Jews believed. To some leaders of the Council, President Harry Truman’s early recognition of the Jewish state in 1948 was not a great human-rights advance but a cynical gambit to pander to a bloc of voters and improve his chance of being reëlected in 1948. The capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in 1960, and his subsequent public war-crimes trial in Jerusalem, which most Jewish Americans cheered, was to the Council’s executive director, an energetic Reform rabbi named Elmer Berger, a disaster, legally indefensible, because Israel didn’t have the right to snatch people who lived in other sovereign nations and put them on trial for violating laws that hadn’t existed at the time.

When American Jews—many of whom, by the postwar decades, were prosperously middle class—began to expand the network of Jewish summer camps and day schools, the Council tried to launch a campaign of resistance, because it saw these institutions as examples of Jewish self-­segregation. When Jewish aid organizations launched campaigns to help Jews in Romania and the Soviet Union immigrate to Israel—­another popular cause throughout Jewish America—the Council saw it as just a self-interested financial scheme, insisting that actually those Jews had no interest in going to the Middle East. In 1958, Leon Uris, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, published “Exodus,” his sentimental best-seller celebrating the birth of Israel. As the film adaptation was set to be released, the Council reached out to movie critics. It praised the director, Otto Preminger, for clearing up the book’s “obvious historical distortions and anti-Arab propaganda,” but still cautioned reviewers about the film’s glorification of the Jewish state. The central concern that pushed the Council to do all this was not primarily Palestinian rights—­in those days, the word Palestinian was not in its vocabulary—­but changes its leaders found alarming in the way American Jews chose to define themselves. They had to be persuaded to resist the tribal impulse.

Father left enough material behind for me to trace how he individually arrived at the version of Jewishness I remember from my childhood. He graduated from high school in 1943, enrolled at Harvard, and then enlisted. During basic training he was given a standardized mental test. The result—probably a high math score—got him assigned to the Signal Corps, the part of the Army in charge of communications. He spent most of his time in the service at a base in the Philippines, encoding outgoing messages.

The most dutiful of sons, Father wrote many long letters to his parents, some of which arrived scissored into scraps by military censors. In one that caught my attention, he told them about a friendship he’d struck up with Herman Weintraub, “a Brooklyn Jew who is thirty but looks fortyfive.” In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” set in Atlanta in 1939, the action revolves around the appearance of Joe Farkas, also a Brooklyn Jew, whose presence in a German Jewish Southern milieu causes intense anxiety. Father was raised to react that way, but now, in 1946, he was surprised to find that he might feel differently.

Herman acted as a kind of older brother to Father, which he appreciated; Father wasn’t used to being around people who came from a wide range of backgrounds, and Herman was. On the other hand, Father knew more about culture than Herman did. He lent Herman his copy of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” (“a beautiful book Tom, a beautiful book”). They discussed Mozart. The pleasure that Herman took in these things was moving to Father. In the end, though, Herman was too far outside Father’s known world for him to allow their relationship to go past a certain point: “I know his kind,” he wrote his parents. “He’ll never amount to anything, inspite of his sensitivities and worthwhile ideas, but he has a warm and generous nature and would be a good friend.”

For Father, the standard way of being Jewish in America (including the standard relation to Zionism) was, simply put, too Jewish, requiring incessantly reminding the world of our disruptive presence as a distinctive people. Fortunately, by his lights, another path was available, the one he and my mother chose, in which you’d persuade yourself that all the main sources of oppression of the Jews over the centuries—­religion, nationalism, ethnicity—­would now finally yield to modernity and rationality, thanks to advances in science and a collective determination never to relive the horrors of the war. Why should we cling to the superstitions and the tribal loyalties of the past, when they were on the way out?

As he entered middle age, Father—by now a partner in a family law firm in New Orleans—took on the project, to be carried out with exquisite delicacy, of getting admitted into New Orleans’s highest social rank. His sponsor in this effort was George Montgomery, a childhood friend of his who, as much as anyone, was the master arbiter of New Orleans high society. At Father’s fiftieth-birthday party, a black-­tie dinner held at our house in 1976, with servants in uniform passing out heavy-­duty drinks, George stood up and said, with tears in his eyes (and Father’s, too), “The most Christian man I know is a Jew, Tommy Lemann.”

The absolute security that George felt about his own social position, plus some liberal impulse stirring within him, led him to want to take down the barriers that the Mardi Gras krewes—social organizations of immense prestige—had erected against Jews, at least on behalf of the Lemanns. One year George arranged for Father and Mother to be invited to one of the leading Mardi Gras balls, that of the Atlanteans. Afterward Mother gave me a report. The members of Atlanteans (all male) were masked. Their wives and female guests were not. They sat in a special section until they were invited to dance with the members. What did everybody think about the Lemanns being there? It was hard for Mother to tell, because of the masks. The men who had asked Mother to dance were obviously the ones who approved, but they were not supposed to identify themselves to her. Who were they? She could only guess. And how had Father and Mother done? Had they slipped up and acted in some way that could have been construed as Jewish, which is to say, unacceptable? I don’t know, but that evening seems to have brought Father’s Mardi Gras ambitions to a close. I don’t remember their setting off for any balls again.

It now looks to me as if no matter how hard Father tried, somehow, at least in the eyes of others, our Jewishness kept reasserting itself. The most obvious ways were through the social antisemitism of the clubs and krewes, or the occasional taunts that would be directed at me at the Country Day School: someone would roll a penny up the aisle past my desk, to demonstrate that, as a Jew, I loved money too much to be able to resist pouncing on it. I had a friend at Country Day whose parents were divorced, which was rare in that time and place. His father had moved away, and none of us had ever met him. His mother remarried, and his stepfather—­one of us, a German Jew—­eventually began legal proceedings to adopt his stepsons formally, which would entail changing their last name from Wilson to Rosenthal. My friend’s father turned up in court and gave him a lecture about how he didn’t want to go through life with a Jewish last name. He was young—he had no idea of how much would be closed off to him. Think of the jobs you wouldn’t get, the clubs you couldn’t join.

These glimpses indicated that there was a conversation about us going on out of our sight and hearing. What was it like? Who among the people we knew spoke about us as vulgar or greedy or strange, and how exactly did they put it? I think of Mother and Father as yearning for a comfortableness that people on the other side of the American Jewish cultural divide, the less assimilated side, could acquire through life in a Jewish community, but which was unavailable to my parents because of the path they had chosen. Their house, a large modern structure that they had built in the nineteen-sixties, had two libraries, a public one for entertaining guests and a private one for themselves. Their large collection of Jewish books was kept in the private one.

By the time that I was in my twenties and living on the East Coast, I felt a distinct tug in the direction of Jewishness. I didn’t know what to do about it, but it was there, not to be denied. Anything that was demonstrably Jewish—­a book, a movie, a restaurant—­drew my interest. Anything that was anti-­Jewish—­a story about exclusion, an obstacle that hadn’t come down, a disapproving enumeration of supposedly Jewish traits—­was possibly more fascinating. But then what? Once or twice, I wandered into a synagogue for services on the Jewish holidays, but I felt completely lost, self-conscious. People would say prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic which I didn’t understand, sing tunes I’d never heard, stand up and sit down according to rules that everybody but me seemed to know. All I had really learned, at that point, was how to conform to the broad outlines of being culturally Jewish. What did that amount to? It was at best shallow, merely a stance that didn’t entail any real commitment, and at worst a false front.

When Alex, my oldest child, was born, a friend who wasn’t Jewish suggested that he not be circumcised. I suppose that it seemed to him to be a barbaric and outdated practice, one that entailed inflicting pain on an innocent newborn. Hearing the suggestion, I was nearly knocked over by an overwhelming wave of resistance that I hadn’t expected. No! Surely I hadn’t had such a visceral reaction because I consciously felt committed to God’s covenant with Abraham; at that point I don’t think I’d ever even read that passage in the Torah. Still, some powerful feeling of peoplehood, of a commandment being violated, swept over me. Not long afterward, we moved to Pelham, a town just outside New York City, to raise Alex and his brother Theo, four years younger, and I made a point of joining the small and relatively new synagogue there, the Pelham Jewish Center. (Much of the housing in New York’s suburbs had previously been “restricted”; the older members of the synagogue had stories about the difficulties they had encountered in getting the local officials’ permission to buy an old house and convert it.)

As the years passed, I’d go to the synagogue sometimes for a Saturday-morning service. At a crucial point, the ark would be opened, everyone would stand, the Torah scroll would be brought out, and someone would walk it around the room so that everyone could symbolically kiss it: a quick touch of the prayer book or the fringe of the tallis, first to the scroll, then to the lips. After this display of reverence, the scroll would be laid down on a podium and opened, and the rabbi would read that week’s portion aloud in a special intonation. At a bar mitzvah, it would be the spindly child, dressed up more fancily than on any previous occasion, who would be called up and handed the staggeringly heavy Torah scroll. Before beginning the procession around the room, the child would intone the essential Jewish prayer, the Shema. And at that point, I would burst into helpless tears, struggling to keep it quiet enough not to be noticed.

What was happening—­why the dramatic effect? Access to this aspect of Jewish life, of the life of my family going back hundreds of years, had been shut off to me, as firmly as a metal door welded shut. That must have upset me a great deal, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of being upset about it. Now the door was open—­whoosh. I was weeping over how liberating it felt to permit myself the luxury of particularism, of membership in a People. Over surrender to the undeniable power of ancient, prerational wisdom. Over the poignancy of my parents’ doomed hope that other doors would open if they closed this one. ♦

This is drawn from “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”

When Queen Elizabeth II was delivered of a baby boy on February 19, 1960, the birth—the first to a reigning British monarch in more than a century—was marked by public celebration. The bells of Westminster Abbey pealed for an hour. The Royal Air Force performed a fighter-jet flyover of central London, as guns saluted from Hyde Park and the Tower. The ships in the Royal Navy fleet were notified of the arrival of a prince—his name, Andrew, had not yet been announced—with the injunction “Splice the mainbrace,” a euphemism for the distribution of a celebratory tot of rum.

Given such an entry into the world, any individual might get ideas above his station—particularly if, as was the case with young Andrew, the second in line to the throne after his brother Charles, there were only two positions in the social hierarchy that were actually above his station. Birthday celebrations in subsequent years seem hardly to have been calculated to kindle a sense of humility. On turning six, Andrew received a custom-made Aston Martin electric toy car. For his twenty-first, there was a party for about six hundred at Windsor Castle, and, for his thirtieth, a lavish “Dance of the Decades” at Buckingham Palace. When Andrew turned forty, he, along with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and their two daughters, commandeered a pod of the London Eye Ferris wheel—other riders complained bitterly about royal queue-jumping—then had a reportedly thirty-thousand-pound blowout at Sunninghill Park, the house they still shared in Berkshire. In advance of his fiftieth birthday, as Andrew Lownie recounts in his indispensable biography, “Entitled,” the Prince told a journalist he was doing “nothing big” to celebrate. Nothing big turned out to be a reception for some three hundred at Buckingham Palace, followed the next night by a bash at St. James’s Palace, with guests, Lownie reports, receiving a miniature album featuring photos of Andrew, as a party favor.

It was photographs, of course, that precipitated Andrew’s unravelling. In 2011, one day after his fifty-first birthday, a newspaper splashed an image of him walking alongside the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, headlined “Prince Andy and the Paedo.” Shortly after that, another paper published a snapshot from 2001 of Andrew with his arm around the waist of seventeen-year-old Virginia Giuffre, with a grinning Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s sometime paramour—and, since 2021, a convicted sex-trafficker—in the background. That photo was taken less than a year after Maxwell and Epstein were guests at yet another birthday celebration for Andrew, a party at Windsor Castle.

Andrew has always maintained that he has no memory of ever meeting Giuffre, and that he committed no wrongdoing in any of his relations with Epstein, who died in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Nonetheless, in 2011, Andrew stepped down from his decade-long role as a U.K. international-trade envoy. In 2019, after a disastrous television interview in which he admitted that he had “let the side down” by his association with Epstein, Andrew stepped back from royal duties.

Just over two years later, Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and military roles; soon afterward, he reached a reportedly multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in a civil sexual-abuse suit, in which he admitted no liability. Last October, with the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoir, in which she alleged that she had had sex with Andrew on three occasions, he surrendered the use of his title Duke of York. Then—in what would once have seemed an impossible demotion—he was effectively stripped of his royal status altogether, and reborn as Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. For a man whose identity was constituted around a sense of social superiority—according to Lownie’s book, if Andrew was met with insufficient deference upon entering a room he would loudly announce, “Let’s try that again,” before exiting and reëntering to hastily performed bows and curtsies—the reduction in status was surely a profound humiliation. Even Charles I, who was executed for treason in 1649, went to the scaffold as King.

Last week, Andrew spent his first birthday as a commoner in circumstances as degraded as earlier celebrations had been grand. At around eight in the morning, he was arrested at a farmhouse on the King’s Sandringham estate—not in relation to any sexual offenses but on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest apparently resulted from documents recently disclosed by the United States Department of Justice suggesting that as trade envoy he had shared privileged information with Epstein. (Mountbatten-Windsor has, as of this writing, not been charged with any crime.) Identified by the police as “a man in his sixties from Norfolk,” Andrew, who is the first senior member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles I, spent about eleven hours in custody before being released under investigation. As the car carrying him departed the police station, a photographer captured another indelible image, of the former Prince slumped in the back seat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed—the boy for whom the chimes once pealed looking very much like a man for whom the bell now tolls.

Andrew is not the only highly placed member of the British establishment whose reputation, at the very least, has been destroyed by an association with Epstein. Peter Mandelson, the former Ambassador to the U.S., is under investigation for passing privileged information along to the financier. (Mandelson has not been arrested or charged, and a report by the BBC noted its understanding that “his position is that he has not acted in any way criminally.”) That scandal has shaken an already unsteady Prime Minister Keir Starmer, despite Starmer’s having never so much as encountered Epstein himself. “Nobody is above the law,” the Prime Minister said during a television interview, broadcast last week just as Andrew was being arrested.

In Britain, on the current evidence, that appears to be true: investigators have been promised the “wholehearted support” of the King, who issued a statement while his brother was still in custody that “the law must take its course.” It is striking that, by contrast, no authorities in the U.S. seem willing or able to seek comparable accountability from the powerful men who entered Epstein’s orbit. President Trump, when asked whether more former Epstein associates might face arrest, replied, “Well, you know, I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated,” deflecting the question while allowing that events were “very, very sad” for the Royal Family, as if this were a parochial affair among posh Brits, free from implications for an American élite. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s legal fate is still unfolding, but whatever the future holds, the party is over for him. When will it be over for the rest of them? ♦

There’s an American figure skater named Ilia Malinin, now perhaps better known, thanks to the brisk exposure of this year’s Winter Olympics, by his self-bestowed nickname—the Quad God. He’s from a town whose name straddles the Old World and the New: Vienna, Virginia. The kid’s only twenty-one years old. He’s got a mane of blond hair, blue eyes set close together under a dark brow, and a free, wild way of leaping, as if catapulted from the ice. Before the Winter Games began, in early February, he’d already won a world championship and a handful of other accolades. And so he was a favorite to win gold, both as a solo act and in the free-skate segment of the U.S. team event.

But competition sometimes stymies talent. That’s why we undergo the increasingly hunterly process of watching—tracking the events in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on NBC and Peacock, streaming the highlights of a number of snowy sports—instead of accepting each sure-sounding prediction as a fait accompli. On February 13th, for his free skate, Malinin glided out onto the ice wearing a sheer shirt with sequins studded in the shape of a blooming flame; the sleeves flowed past his wrists and sheathed both of his hands, like a pair of stockings masquerading as mittens. Before his music began, a voice boomed over the rink’s speakers: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Away he went, with his usual slick velocity. Every four years, I have to learn again what a “quad flip” is. Malinin swept himself up into one—an efficient, twisting spiral just above the surface of the ice. He looked good. But then, trying a quadruple axel—a maneuver once considered impossible by the sport’s aristocracy—something wobbled in his mechanics, and he made only one rotation. His left leg flailed a bit in the air. Another mistake came shortly after. Malinin stuck a double loop instead of a quadruple, groupings of four now evading him at every turn. “We don’t usually see Ilia make mistakes like this,” a commentator said. You could see Malinin sigh, trying to shake his nerves.

But on his next big jump he took a spill. The crowd, still cheering, sounded slightly hollow. What was going on? Before the routine ended, Malinin fell again, as if eager to confirm that, yes, his moment of glory had become a real disaster. The Olympics, with their nationalistic gloss, lend themselves to symbolic readings. And, sure, it was hard to watch the anguish on Malinin’s face after he’d finished and not think of the country whose flag he’d come to represent—young, vigorous, heedlessly unfearful, and now flaming out suddenly, plummeting down the rankings. Malinin ended the event in eighth place.

Of course, it wasn’t just Malinin whose performance tugged my attention away from Italy and toward America. A handful of athletes from the States have spoken up, less in righteous indignation than in baffled concern, about American politics these days. The curler Rich Ruohonen—who, when he’s not winning tournaments, works as a personal-injury lawyer—spoke at a press conference about ICE’s outrageous behavior in Minneapolis. “I’m proud to be here to represent Team U.S.A., and to represent our country,” he said. “But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention what’s going on in Minnesota and what a tough time it’s been for everybody. This stuff is going on right around where we live.” Looking like he might cry, he stopped to issue a few jagged breaths before he went on. “I am a lawyer,” he said, “and we do have—we have a constitution, and it allows us freedom of the press, freedom of speech, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. And what’s happening in Minnesota is wrong.”

It was a startling thing, this impromptu civics lesson, offered in the middle of an international sporting occasion. The Olympic organizers have gone to great and sometimes absurd pains to excise political messaging from the Games. The Haitian team was made to remove an image of Toussaint Louverture from its uniforms, which reproduced a portrait by the celebrated artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. The eighteenth-century revolutionary’s horse remained, riderless, backgrounded by bright-green leaves and a tangy blue sky. The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from his event for wearing a black-and-white helmet depicting athletes killed in Russia’s war of aggression against his homeland.

But the Americans couldn’t totally suppress their sour mood. Hunter Hess, a skier, made a useful distinction between the flag stitched onto his clothes and the vision of his country that lives in his heart and mind. “Just because I wear the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” he said. Donald Trump responded on Truth Social: “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it.”

As if attempting to display all this tumult on the slopes, the forty-one-year-old skier Lindsey Vonn crashed violently after her pole hooked a gate during the women’s downhill race. Only nine days prior, she’d torn her A.C.L. The pride it had taken to race anyway felt like an echo—or a symptom—of the national character. Her legs bent horribly, as if in flight, one from the other. Even over the broadcast, you could hear her howl.

Sometimes the national angle on the proceedings had a happier slant. Take the case of Francesca Lollobrigida, the thirty-five-year-old Italian speed skater who won gold in the women’s three-thousand-metre and five-thousand-metre races. In the three thousand, you could see the home-town crowd—its delight at her presence, its hope for her victory—urging her forward in the final third of the race. She’d started out aggressively, and it seemed like her energy should have been about to wane. Instead, she surged. After she won, she searched the crowd for her cute young son, Tommaso. She’d done it for him, for the nation.

Winter sports appear to flow naturally from the landscapes that act as their settings. The existence of a steep slope, lost in powder, seems to cry out for a reckless ski jump or a series of ramp-enhanced snowboard tricks. Hockey and speed skating and figure skating all point to the reality of the pond—frozen over, sturdy enough to hold a human body. Even the bobsled, that vehicle for the death wishes of puppyish youths, has a kind of intuitive connection to the fear and the thrill we feel while gliding or slipping on the ice. Cross-country skiers, heaving and snotting, look like packs of unusually fit travellers, perhaps chasing down a warm meal to curb the fatal chill of a long winter.

This illusion of the “natural”—more than the thrill of one event or another—is what makes the Winter Olympics pleasurable to watch. The season’s sports look like they require too much money and too much time for the average person to learn, much less master. The American snowboarder Chloe Kim, that alpine Hells Angel: How does she do it? I watched her spin in the air more times than I could count, landing in the middle of a parabolic curve of the board. To follow her body as she flings it skyward is to draw many invisible squiggles with your mind—a kind of retinal graffiti across the natural majesty of the mountain.

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, a cross-country skier from Norway, shucked his way uphill at a pace that seemed impossible; later, it was confirmed that he’d been hauling ass up a hill at the pace of a sub-six-minute mile. Almost every time somebody in that sport crosses the finish line, they immediately crumple, gasping, to the ground. They look like they’re about to give up the ghost, which makes sense in a way that the endeavor itself really doesn’t. Klæbo’s rabid climb was almost sinister, a Newtonian affront against gravity and the native difficulty of hills.

Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron, a French ice-dancing duo, beat an American team made up of Madison Chock and Evan Bates. The victory was controversial; many onlookers thought the judges had robbed the Americans. The French insisted that their routine had a high level of difficulty and that they had been rewarded justly. Having no grounding in the aesthetics or the hierarchies of the sport, I couldn’t really tell what the fuss was about. I’ll admit that I enjoyed the French duo more, simply because of the confident elegance with which they’d taken their positions. They moved in swanning semicircles around the rink, making bold eye contact with onlookers, offering a foretaste of their uncanny coördination with each other even before their bodies had commenced their true engagement. Their elegance looked to me like an easy comfort with—a surrender to—the antifriction of the ice.

Long bouts of exposure to the wild sometimes drive men crazy. You know the archetype—frozen beard and frantic eyes, a raving, paranoid quality of speech. Maybe this explains the bizarre case of the Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Lægreid. After nabbing a bronze medal in the twenty-kilometre biathlon, Lægreid took an interview that quickly became a tearful monologue, not about his sport but about personal matters. Six months ago, he said, he’d met the love of his life. Three months later, amid the chaos of new love and the strictures of training for the Olympics, he’d found time to cheat on his object of affection. “I made my biggest mistake,” he said, choking on tears.

“Sport has come second these last few days,” he said. (Was this a parenthetical excuse for coming in third?) “My only way to solve it is to tell everything and put everything on the table and hope that she can still love me,” he continued. “I have nothing to lose.”

Nothing but his dignity—and the privacy of his already wounded beloved. In the space of a few minutes, Lægreid had managed to make not only the biathlon but the entirety of the Olympics about himself. I felt a pang of sympathy for the guy. He reminded me of an American. ♦

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The Washington Roundtable discusses the upcoming State of the Union address and the public’s shift against Donald Trump on two of his signature issues: the economy and immigration. What pitch might Trump make for himself and the Republican Party heading into the midterms? “On the economy, he’s in the same fix Biden was in,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. “He's trying to yell at people and tell them, ‘You are better off than you think you are,’ and that, we know, doesn't work.” Plus, the group examines what the retirement of the Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress and what the Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s opposition to a wealth tax in California can tell us about ideological fissures within both parties.

This week’s reading:

“The E.P.A. Rescinds a Landmark Finding,” by Bill McKibben

“The Chaos of an ICE Detention,” by Jordan Salama

“​Presidents’ Days: From Obama to Trump,” by David Remnick

“Trump Is Still Deporting People Wherever He Wants,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Jeffrey Epstein Files Are Peter Mandelson’s Final Disgrace,” by John Cassidy

“Zohran Mamdani, the Everywhere Mayor,” by Molly Fischer

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